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Jack Gilbert Quotes - Page 2

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I'm vain enough to think that I've made a successful life. I've had everything I've ever wanted. You can't beat that.

I'm vain enough to think that I've made a successful life. I've had everything I've ever wanted. You can't beat that.

Jack Gilbert
Successful, Thinking, Enough

But anything worth doing is worth doing badly. Like being there by that summer ocean on the other side of the island while love was fading out of her, the stars burning so extravagantly those nights that anyone could tell you they would never last.

Jack Gilbert
Summer, Stars, Ocean
Jack Gilbert, “Failing And Flying”

It is convenient for the old men to blame Eve. To insist we are damned because a country girl talked to the snake one afternoon long ago. Children must starve in Somalia for that, and old women be abandoned in our greatest cities. It’s why we will finally be thrown into the lakes of molten lead. Because she was confused by happiness that first time anyone said she was beautiful. Nevertheless, she must be the issue, so people won’t notice that rocks and galaxies, mathematics and rust are also created in His image.

Jack Gilbert
Beautiful, Girl, Country
Jack Gilbert (2012). “Collected Poems”, p.382, Knopf

You will love again, people say. Give it time. Me with time running out. Day after day of the everyday. What they call real life, made of eighth-inch gauge. Newness strutting around as if it were significant. Irony, neatness and rhyme pretending to be poetry. I want to go back to that time after Michiko's death when I cried every day among the trees. To the real. To the magnitude of pain, of being that much alive.

Jack Gilbert
Running, Pain, Real
Jack Gilbert (2013). “The Great Fires: Poems, 1982-1992”, p.13, Knopf

I believe that Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the end of his triumph.

Jack Gilbert
Believe, Triumph, Failing
Jack Gilbert (2009). “Refusing Heaven”, p.18, Knopf

I had lived all of my youthful dreams, but I couldn't think of many adult ones. I finally realized that we don't have many dreams for adults because, historically, people have always died much younger than they do today.

Jack Gilbert
Dream, Thinking, People

To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth all the years of sorrow that are to come.

Jack Gilbert
Years, Silence, Sorrow
Jack Gilbert (2009). “Refusing Heaven”, p.3, Knopf

We are surrounded by the absurd excess of the universe. By meaningless bulk, vastness without size, power without consequence. The stubborn iteration that is present without being felt. Nothing the spirit can marry. Merely phenomenon and its physics. An endless, endless of going on. No habitat where the brain can recognize itself. No pertinence for the heart. Helpless duplication.

Jack Gilbert
Heart, Brain, Habitat
Jack Gilbert (2012). “Collected Poems”, p.293, Knopf

THE ABANDONED VALLEY Can you understand being alone so long you would go out in the middle of the night and put a bucket into the well so you could feel something down there tug at the other end of the rope?

Jack Gilbert
Night, Long, Buckets
Jack Gilbert (2012). “Collected Poems”, p.235, Knopf

When I was walking in the mountains with the Japanese man and began to hear the water, he said, 'What is the sound of the waterfall?' 'Silence,' he finally told me.

Jack Gilbert
Men, Water, Silence

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